This document relates to ranking content items responsive to a query and based on when the query is received.
The rise of the Internet has enabled access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc. Content items of particular interest to a user can be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. One example search engine is the Google search engine provided by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., U.S.A. The query can include one or more search terms or phrases, and the search engine can identify and, optionally, rank the content items based on the search terms or phrases in the query and present the content items to the user (e.g., in order according to the rank).
Queries are sometimes ambiguous with respect to the interests of the users. For example, queries for “turkey” can return results related to the country of Turkey and results related to turkey recipes for Thanksgiving holidays in Canada and the United States. Accordingly, users may have to revise their queries one or more times until the search engine returns the content items that are of interest to the user.